Digital signage system are systems that transmit digital video information to targeted digital signage display hardware which also may include text or characters information. These digital video systems are made in a form of an advertisement, to allow potential customers to recognize and get awareness of a product or service. The digital signage display hardware is designed to be installed in a common public area, especially in brick and mortar shops or physical business premises. The video advertising content can be stored on a memory media or transmitted from a management server system that communicates with the digital signage unit via utilizing the internet technology.
Many factors do contribute to the effectiveness of such advertisements, predominantly the location, time of day, and people viewing these advertisement. Video advertisements are linear two dimensional media, which means when a video advertisements is being played as time passes, there is a limited chance of an audience to view such an advertisement. Most often, after an advertisement was played, a potential customer or audience may not remember the key points of what they had seen. Without proper mechanism to allow the information relayed to be remembered, this may defeat the purpose of an advertisement hence making the advertisement less effective.
In reference to a typical prior art system, in FIG. 1, a business owner may choose to use a localize digital signage system 102, which necessitate the business owner to perform regular maintenance in managing the digital content or advertisements that are being displayed onto their own digital signage device. This is shown at business subscriber 110 and digital signage unit 112. This can be cumbersome, and may involve hiring a small marketing team in managing the localize content of the digital signage ultimately increasing cost and time. Without scheduled or regular maintenance of getting fresh advertisement or information content, the information displayed on a digital signage device may become stale, which in the long run may discourage audience in viewing the information display, again defeating the purpose of advertising.
A lesser cumbersome method is by utilizing a cloud digital signage system 104. When a business owner 114 decides to advertise through such a system, he or she may contact the advertisement department of the third party company that is running the digital signage cloud services 104. However, the process of finalizing the advertisement propagation may not be as easy as an autonomous solution. One important factor is finalizing the actual price of advertising a content, which maybe dependent on the space, time, and location of the digital signage unit. The hassle of acquiring a price of that particular advertisement has to be calculated by the advertising department, which is not revealed instantly. Such progression in order to get an advertisement out to the masses, maybe critical especially when it comes to volatile services or products where information is required to be relayed to the public in more faster fashion, e.g. a store manager decides to run an additional 2 hour aggressive sale at the very last minute, in order to compete with his or her neighbor.
Another scenario is the type of targeted audience that the advertisement should be delivered. Most systems transmit advertisements to any general digital signage unit, which maybe loss of resources, since as mentioned before digital signage advertisement is limited with the time factor and chances of a patron would see the advertisement maybe affected. A possible negative scenario; it is not very encouraging to actually see a competition's advertisement played on a business owner facility digital signage hardware, when the purpose of the whole idea of having the digital signage in the facility is to actually promote the business owner's business. Without the proper algorithm, advertisements that are not delivered to their target, cannot generate maximum positive results for the advertisers.
With current prior art method, customers 108 that have visualize the advertisements from a digital signage have to perform a relative search of what they have seen on a forth party search engine 106. Very frequently such act of searching may result to inaccurate search backs to the original business that was trying to advertise the product or services. Not all searches yield improper results, but since all designed search engine are very key word specific, the results maybe unexpected and unsatisfactory.